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B.F. Skinner was a renowned behavioral psychologist who began his career in the 1930s and is best known for his development of the Skinner box, a laboratory apparatus used to conduct and record the results of operant conditioning experiments with animals. (These are typically experiments in which an animal must manipulate an object such as a lever in order to obtain a reward): When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944, Skinner (who then lived in Minnesota) constructed an alternative type of crib for her that was something like a large version of a hospital incubator, a tall box with a door at its base and a glass window in front. This baby tender, as Skinner called it, provided Deborah with a place to sleep and remain comfortably warm throughout the severe Minnesota winters without having to be wrapped in numerous layers of clothing and blankets (and developing the attendant rashes). Deborah slept in her novel crib until she was two and a half years old, and by all accounts grew up a happy, healthy, thriving child. The trouble began in October 1945, when the magazine Ladies' Home Journal ran an article by Skinner about his baby tender. The article featured a picture of Deborah in a portable (and therefore smaller) version of the box, her hands pressed against the glass, under the headline Baby in a Box. People who didn't read the article carefully, or who merely glanced at the picture or heard about the article from someone else but didn't read it themselves confused the baby tender with a Skinner box, even though the article clearly explained that the baby tender was something quite different: As Deborah Skinner described her experience with the baby tender many years later: Nonetheless, many people jumped to the conclusion that Skinner was raising his daughter in a cramped box equipped with bells and food trays and was conducting psychological experiments of the rewards and punishments variety on her. Outraged letter-writers protested that a child should not be kept in a box and subjected to experiments like an animal. Over the years the details about Skinner's baby tender (which was unsuccessfully marketed under the names Heir Conditioner and Aircrib) became more fuzzily remembered, and by the mid-1960s (when Deborah turned twenty-one), the rumor had started that Skinner's psychotic daughter had sued him for traumatizing her by raising her in a box and conducting psychological experiments upon her, and that she had enventually committed suicide. In fact, Deborah Skinner (now Deborah Skinner Buzan) grew up about as normally as can be, remained close to her father, and has been living and working in London as an artist since the mid-1970s. She quipped years later that I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy. And I don't seem to have committed suicide, and of her unusual upbringing she said, It wasn't really a psychological experiment but what you might call a happiness-through-health experience. I think I was a very happy baby. Most of the criticisms of the box are by people who don't understand what it was. In 2004 author Lauren Slater touched off a brouhaha and accusations of shoddy research when she repeated many of the familiar Skinner box rumors in her book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. According to legend, she wrote, Skinner kept Deborah: Deborah Skinner Buzan affirmed that these legends were nothing more than outrageous rumors: Although some of the information presented in Slater's book was indicated as being legend or rumor, Deborah Buzan felt that Slater inaccurately mischaracterized her father as a scientist who used her to prove his theories by putting her into a laboratory box, and that Slater seriously libeled her in claiming: I did not come across any data that could convince me of [Deborah Skinner's] mental status. Ms. Buzan responded:
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